PAGE 6
TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 2014
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
FILM
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MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
Kevin Costner stars in "Draft Day" as the general manager of the Cleveland Browns.
Kevin Costner tackles football in 'Draft Day'
IMCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
Kevin Costner is the general manager of the Cleveland Browns in his new movie, "Draft Day." The Ivan Reitmandirected project — a kind of gridiron "Moneyball" — takes place on that fateful spring day when the 32 teams in the National Football League go hunting for the cream of the year's college crop, signing, trading, strategizing, looking to fill holes in their lineups and, hopefully, find the real talent out there, and the players their competition might have missed.
The NFL draft has become a big deal in its own right, a spectator sport, with the successive rounds of picks taking place over a long weekend. (The 2014 draft: May 8-10 on the NFL Network.)
Costner, who has had a good run when it comes to sports
movies — "Field of Dreams" and "Bull Durham" (baseball), "Tin Cup" (golf) — relates to "Draft Days" go-my-own-way protagonist, Sonny Weaver Jr., a general manager being second-guessed by just about everyone from his coaches to his coworker and lover (Jennifer Garner) to his mom (Ellen Burstyn).
Costner is 59 now and has been in movies since the start of the '80s ("Frat Boy #1") in Ron Howard's "Night Shift" was an early job). He was Elliot Ness in "The Untouchables" (1987) and received best actor, best director and best picture Oscar nominations for his 1990 Lakota Indian epic, "Dances With Wolves". He won the directing and picture Academy Awards.
on in "Draft Day," and the handicapping, prospecting and deal-making that goes on in the movie biz.
Costner did not miss the parallels between the handicapping, prospecting and deal-making that goes
"I'm sure, if people tried to handicap me against all the actors that you would have compared me to, when we first started, it would be interesting," the actor ruminated on the phone from Los Angeles last week. "How many have just fallen off the cliff, so to speak — the ones that never went past one or two movies?"
"How do you handicap that when you look at someone? You know, how do you measure it? You're mistaken if you did it by looks. You're mistaken if you did it by height
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... And you'd be mistaken if you did it by what everybody else said versus what you think."
He adds: "You have to analyze talent, and see if people have a genuine love."
Mickey Rooney, with grit always put on a show
IMCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
Everyone knows Mickey Rooney, but who really remembers the extent of his success? How many now living can testify not only to how large this man loomed over the American film landscape but also to the particular qualities that made him such an enormous success in his prime?
Everyone knows Rooney, who died at the great age of 93, precisely because he lived so long. The tireless last surviving star of Hollywood's 1930s Golden Age was always ready to make an appearance when there was a crowd waiting to applaud.
Actor Mickey Rooney waves to the crowd during the Hollywood Christmas Parade in this Nov. 27, 2005, file photo. Rooney died Sunday, April 6, 2014. He was 93.
But Rooney was more than just any star. In the final innocent prewar years of 1939, 1940 and 1941, he was the country's biggest box-office attraction, period, end of story. And the actor reached that pinnacle not by being a dashing action hero lead or a glamorous romantic lead, but by playing a teenage boy, a character one contemporary critic called "the perfect composite of everybody's kid brother." Nothing says more than that about how America's popular culture movie tastes have changed in the interim.
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
Rooney wasn't just any teenager either. He was brash, exuberant, unstoppable; the kind of kid Americans, once upon a time, liked to feel was representative of this country at its good-hearted, irrepressible best.
Even British rocker Ray Davies and the Kinks, who
in 1972 recorded "Celluloid Heroes," their classic tribute to the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, paid tribute to that quality by claiming, "If you stamped on Mickey Rooney, he would still turn round and smile." Just so.
Rooney seems to have come by his trademark industriousness and resilience honestly. He was born Joe Yule Jr., the son of two vaudevillians who took constant movement and hard
knocks as a matter of course. He began his stage career as a toddler and his first film role came in 1926 when, at age 6, he apparently played a midget in something called "Not to Be Trusted."
The young boy's first sustained success came in a series of shorts made between 1927 and 1936 based on a comic strip character named Mickey McGuire.
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